Sometimes I Like Preachy Writing

I dunno. I feel like the old adage for good fiction which says “Don’t preach” is a few shades off the mark. Just look at all the amazingly successful and beloved novelists (even if they are loved by different audiences) who wear their ideologies on their sleeve: Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club especially), Philip Pullman, and many more. I would even argue that George R.R. Martin flies his nihilistic banner high for all to see. His message seems to be “Power is for those who are strong enough to seize it, and that’s the end of it.” But he’s got incredible prose, and is fantastic story teller, so it’s not a problem. I mean, doesn’t it really come down to that? You can preach all you want in a story, as long as you’re interesting and entertaining. Some people will get annoyed of course, because in general we feel uncomfortable when we encounter ideas/ messages/ ideologies that clash with our beliefs. But that doesn’t mean it is bad writing simply because it is ideologically driven. (It also doesn’t mean it’s good writing, of course.) Thoughts?

Your Mom Stinks of Hope

I like poetic prose. Rhyme and rhythm. (Or rhythm and rhyme.) I dig similes. I also enjoy metaphors. Yes, in general, I like playful, spirited, energetic and creative language that bends things around a bit. By Jove, I even like slang. I simply say this so that the poets around the world will know that I am not biased against them from the start. Poets, I love you. (Make that roughly twenty-five percent of you. Let’s be honest: the rest of you are more or less rubbish.)

Here’s my beef. This Sunday in church, there was a short inspirational video shown after the sermon about hope. And at one point, the phrase “may you stink of hope” was used. I think the intent was to inspire people to allow their hope to be felt by others around them, so that those people too would be inspired. A wonderful sentiment. But let’s call this what it is: a badly botched metaphor. I don’t want to blow things out of proportion, but “stink of hope?” Unacceptable. I’m putting my foot down.

Now, to be fair, I suppose I can admit that it was an effective choice of language in the sense that I still remember it. But the imagery this conjures up is only negative, and of course that is because “stink” is never used in a positive sense. “Dude, it stinks in here.” Or, “Dude, your girlfriend kind of stinks.” There is not a scenario in which this could be taken positively. Even if I try to get creative and say “Dude, your girlfriend stinks of perfume” or “money” or “beauty” it is still quite clearly negative (not to mention confusing).

I imagine “hope stinking Christians” as these obnoxious sales people who run around smacking people in the face with their happiness. And God help us, we have all known people like that. They do stink. (Again, not in a positive way.)

“May your joy be as contagious as syphilis.”

“May God fill you up with so much love that you puke it all over your friends.”

It just doesn’t work for me.

Alright, devil’s advocate: What about slang? Didn’t the 1980’s teach us that “bad” can be “good?” The same for “wicked,” “nasty,” and even “stupid.” “Yo, dawg, that girl is straight up nasty hot.” And yet “nasty” is traditionally negative! Madness! But it works! Fine. So I’m a hypocrite. But I stand by my statement: “stink” is negative. Only. It should be used to describe farts and dead people. If that makes me a crotchety old man who hates poetry, then so be it. Jedi.

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight might just be the best superhero movie ever made. I’ll have to see it again to be sure, but it easily cracks the top three. Why? It’s simple: because director Christopher Nolan refuses to be confined by the traditional limits of the genre.

With superhero movies, the audience is expected to be generous with its suspension of disbelief, and clearly (judging from the box-office returns of many superhero movies), we’re okay with that. We can live with a certain level of nonsense, because it’s fun and exciting. It’s just a superhero movie, right? Lighten up. But as a result of this agreement, it can be easy to dismiss the Herculean characters we’re watching as mere pawns of entertainment. We like them, sure, but we don’t really identify with them.

The Dark Knight pops that old agreement like a zit; no more nonsense. Knight insists on being taken seriously, and defies you to dismiss it as just summer entertainment. Everything hammers the audience as dead-on real. The settings. The danger. And most importantly, the characters.

Like all good stories, it starts with great characters. There are no weak links; Christian Bale plays the increasingly smug Bruce Wayne with cool candor; Aaron Eckhart dials down his usual pomp a half degree for Harvey Dent and makes him both likable, and tragic; Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman continue to be perfect in the supporting roles of Alfred and Lucius Fox; Gary Oldman is subtly brilliant as the determinedly righteous Officer Gordon; and Maggie Gyllenhaal brings a nice spark to the role of Rachel Dawes. Yes. She sure does. I know what you’re thinking: this is all just filler talk. Yup. You busted me. Because as good as these actors are in the film—and I meant it when I said there were no weak links—they pale in comparison to the late Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. It is already becoming something of a cliché to praise Ledger’s performance, but the truth simply can’t be understated: Ledger’s Joker ranks among the best movie villains of all time. He’s flat-out mesmerizing, and it will be a stinging disappointment if he doesn’t posthumously receive the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It’s strange to admit, but I found myself being increasingly lured into enjoying his sick psychosis.

Anchored by the maniacal Joker, the tone of the film is relentlessly dark. That’s not to say there isn’t humor. But it comes in unsettling forms: Alfred’s dry witticisms of the harsh times, the passively bitter exchanges between Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, and most especially, the sinister musings of the Joker. Yes, the Joker is funny, but it’s definitely in the how-can-someone-be-so-evil-and-so-charismatic-at-the-same-time category of humor.

The Joker never breaks the forth wall, but he might as well; his mockery of humanity’s goodness strikes us with uncommon force because indeed we fear that he might very well be right. As the Joker puts it, “People are only as good as the world lets them be.”

That’s really the theme of the movie, this question being asked again and again: What happens to good when it is confronted by evil? Which is stronger? Even as he is terrorizing the hapless citizen of Gotham and challenging Batman to rise to the occasion, it is as if the Joker is actually looking at us—his audience—and demanding that we answer. When you are confronted by evil—and the movie promises that we will be—how will you respond? It is a haunting question, and not one easily shrugged aside. For it is one thing to denounce evil when it is locked in the realm of fiction; it is quite another to stand against it when it is manifested in its most terrifying and seductive forms in our actual lives.

Hell's Kitchen

Ever watch that show “Hell’s Kitchen”? It’s basically typical, sensational, reality-TV-trash. But I find myself watching it from time to time anyway. Chef Ramsey intrigues me. He’s so blisteringly harsh, and yet he has an unexpectedly sharp ethical compass. Not that he is a great model of Christian principles, but just the same, he seems to detest waste, and not just because it is bad for business. He will often make his chefs sort through garbage to remind them of just how wasteful they can be. Another thing that I admire about him is that he has a keen sense of where food comes from. Chicken is not just slabs of meat that you buy at the grocery store. It comes from a living animal that had to die so that we can consume it. On tonight’s episode, he had the chefs catch chickens… and I actually thought he was going to make them kill them to demonstrate his point. They didn’t actually have to do it; I’m guessing this was a decision made by a Fox executive to avoid animal rights activists protesting. I was actually a little disappointed. Not because I was thirsty to see chicken blood, but because I think that I too suffer from an unhealthy disconnect from the food that I eat. I take it for granted that an animal had to die so that I could eat it.

The Seeker: Movie Review

The Seeker movie review

In the vast, daunting shadow of Harry Potter, there are fleets of adolescent-driven fantasy stories out there. Unfortunately, The Seeker shuffles in near the bottom of the pack (though still noticeably above last year’s asinine flop Eragon).

In Seeker, all the ingredients for a successful fantasy flick are present; pesky but ultimately amiable siblings, a strained parental relationship, a potential love interest, and of course newly discovered magical powers which the hero (Will Stanton) must use to combat the forces of evil bent on taking over the world. But unfortunately, it’s all quite bland as a result of poor execution.

In films like this, we can forgive a good deal of sub par acting (of which Seeker has plenty). Often, we can get by with just one or two charismatic, seasoned actors who bring some flare to an inevitably child-flooded cast. Seeker had precisely zero memorable characters. Particularly disappointing was actor Christopher Eccleston (fantastic in 1998’s Elizabeth), who portrayed the dark rider, the main villain of the film. Rather than being, say, ruthless or cunning, he was bizarrely nonchalant and even-tempered, making me wonder if he missed his true calling as vacuum salesman, or possibly a librarian.

But Seeker's biggest problems stem from the directing and the script-writing. As I watched the movie, I kept wondering if director David L. Cunningham was in some kind of rush to finish the project, as he demonstrated no interest in addressing obvious questions we the audience would have. Why is Will so quickly at ease with his new powers (which include time-traveling and the ability to summon fire, amongst other things)? Why don’t his brothers react when they learn that young Will suddenly has the strength to throw them across the room? (“I guess that’s puberty!” Cue laughter from audience?) And this one bugged me too; why bribe a menacing Viking when you can simply scorch him with a fireball?

Cunningham has a knack for draining any potential suspense out of a scene. For instance, a witch working for the dark rider sends minions of cobras after the heroes; not a bad plan, right? Except that as the scene goes on, some of the heroes are literally up to their necks in snakes… which never bother to bite them, making the snakes about as frightening as the ball-pit at Chuck E. Cheese. I understand that it’s a PG movie, but that doesn’t mean you have to feed us Saturday morning cartoon mush.

Even the special effects aren’t very special, especially not for a fantasy flick. (Okay, there are some cool bits involving a smoke-like substance spreading that I found enjoyable to watch.)

On the whole, The Seeker is simply a forgettable film, and will quietly slip away into the vault of other forgettable fantasy movies from the 2000s era. Just as well; bring on the next Harry Potter movie.

I Care About Me

Banks suck, don’t they? This morning I was looking at my account, and I saw that I had been charged $160 in bogus fees, and subsequently had to spend the next hour explaining to various bank employees over the phone why the fees were bogus. But man, I fought like a hornet, and ultimately I got what I wanted.

Well now, after things have been “set right,” I’m calm, but also a little unsettled. When I found out that I had been wronged by my bank, I responded with quick fervor. No, it felt more like righteous anger. “Put me on the phone with someone who will remove these fees. Now.” I didn’t have to think it over, or plan it out. I called the bank immediately, because, well, my assets were being threatened. Obviously.

But the thing that disturbs me is that I couldn’t tell you of a time in recent memory when I acted nearly that decisively on the behalf of someone else. I certainly don’t believe I was wrong for calling the bank to correct the error; no, but the problem is that I don’t fight like that for other people.

There are perhaps a thousand reasons for this, but at the root of all of them is a simple one; I’m afraid of what it might cost me to care what happens in someone else’s life as much as I care what happens in my own. Because if you really care about someone, then you invest yourself in them. And if you invest your time, and energy in other people, then you will have less time and energy to invest in yourself.

I’m desperate to see my dreams become realities. But even more powerful than my desire to succeed is my terror of failure. Earthquakes of paranoia rumble through my mind telling me that if I am not actively pursing my goals and ambitions every single day that I will eventually wake up a fifty-year-old nobody. That if I ignore the various responsibilities of my life that I will become a train wreck.

And it’s true; people who ignore their dreams for long enough become nothing, and people who ignore their responsibilities become train wrecks. Whether or not we ever express this or admit it, we know this is true; we are creatures that require maintenance. God knows this too. Which I think is why He tells us over and over and over in Scripture not to worry, but to trust Him, and allow Him to take care of us. He actually commands us not to worry.

He also commands us to love others and to be servants. That is precisely what Jesus came here to teach us how to do; love others and serve them. He goes on to say that if we love Him we will obey Him. So as a follower of Jesus, I am left with this rather unnerving question; how do I start loving people more? How do I start serving them?

As I am writing this, something embarrassingly obvious occurs to me; there is an overpass three blocks from my front door where homeless folks hang out. (Live.) Something tells me I should start there. If I’m being honest, I really don’t want to go. Not even a little bit. It’s midnight. I want to go to bed. And yet, I’m quite sure that God is telling me to stop typing, and get off my ass.

A brief follow-up:

I picked up a guy named Dave from under the bridge. We went to McDonald’s and sat outside because the inside-seating was closed. We talked about movies a little, and both of us agreed that “Snakes on a Plane” wasn’t very realistic. Then another homeless guy named Michael showed up, so we swung through the drive-thru again. Michael was a Vietnam vet and didn’t look so great; his hands looked like he had just punched his way out of a coffin and then dug up to the surface. When I was dropping Michael off, he took hold of my shoulder and lowered his head. I think he was praying for me.

I’m not sure what to make of any of this. But I know that God is telling me to stop living in the land of hypotheticals.

I’ll try.

Hallelujah for Gospel Music and Word Games

I went to a concert tonight at Ebenezer United Methodist Church, and I will say this; there are certainly worse ways you could spend an evening. It was a night of praise and worship, with lively, joyful Gospel music that was sometimes brilliant, and other times rather straining to the ear, but always powerful genuine in giving glory to the Living God. I think I have a ceiling for the amount of joy I can take in one serving. And three hours worth was definitely pushing it for me. But thankfully I came prepared with a couple pieces of paper and some pencils, so my buddy Steve and I played word games to, uh, bring some variation to the worship.